Making select required in p:message

[xml-project]

No description provided.

[gimsieke]

Maybe a bit late to the party and not exactly about this particular change:

In XSLT, I often put other items than strings (elements, whole documents, until Saxon 10 also attributes) into the xsl:message/@select attribute. If it only allowed strings, I’d need to take care of serialization, sometimes type casting and concatenation myself.

What about accepting item()* for the select? And if we accept also an empty sequence, we need not make select required. It could be made implementation-defined what happens if the message content is empty: Does the processor write something like Message: then or nothing at all?

[ndw]

@gimsieke 's point is a good one. Sigh. Everything is more complicated than you'd like. Choices:

1. Make the select attribute item()*, add a serialization option and say that the items are serialized for output. Potentially simpler for users, but also a bit more complicated. And also a bit more like xsl:message
2. Leave it as it is, make users write serialize() themselves.

I want the answer to be 2, but I have a feeling that the right answer is 1.

[xml-project]

@gimsieke Good point. For now using fn:serialize() should do a good job, doesn't it. So I would ask you to postpost this new feature to V next. Is this possible?